Shieldmaiden
by Sister Coyote
Summary: Kairi has been left behind and alone for the last time. She will not be helpless again. Small spoilers for Kingdom Hearts 2.


Kairi dreamed...

_...of a shore where she and Sora and Riku stand back-to-back-to-back. The air hums and throbs with a strong smell of ozone. Her skin crawls. Something is coming..._

_The darkness rises like the wind, crests like a wave, falls like an avalanche. The thousand shapes that struggle from it are clotted oily with sulphur eyes, are armored grey and purple and red, are screaming on wings made of black. Behind her, she can hear keyblades materialize with a crackle-whoosh. But her hands are empty._

_When the dark creatures come, they touch her not to hurt her, but to drag her away. As she sinks under a hundred cold hands, a thousand cold-burning eyes, she reaches back to Riku and Sora, and in her mind she screams_ I will not be left behind again, _but the tide is too strong, and she is not strong enough..._

Kairi woke from the dream sweating, her eyes stinging with fury. She clenched her hands in her sheets. A shudder trickled down her back. _It won't happen that way. Not again._ She would not wait and worry and wonder – again – if they would make it back alive and whole. She _refused_.

Mouth dry and hands shaking, she reached out, palm down, and tried to remember how her keyblade had felt in her hand. The rounded grip had fit to her palm, and she'd had to tip her wrist and flex her arm to counterbalance the flat weight of its blade levering downwards. For a moment she felt foolish, but if she had learned anything it was that belief itself had power. An electric tingle made her clench her hand suddenly, and when she did there was something in it, and the weight she had imagined was there.

Her delight at that lasted for a good half-hour, before she realized that she had no idea what to _do_ with it.

---

The sun dropped into the ocean, slow and swollen. Sora's head rested on her shins, and that couldn't have been comfortable for him, but he had put himself there and made no signs of moving.

"Wanna go to the game?" he asked drowsily. "I hear Tidus is pretty good."

"He is," she said, and the fact that Sora didn't know that was one more reminder. She and Selphie had stood in the stands and screamed their throats raw every home game of the past season, not because they cared so much about blitzball or even really about how the Aurochs were doing, but because it was _Tidus_, and they'd been friends since forever, and they could tease him about his swelled head afterwards.

It made her feel odd, and a little cold, to remember that Sora had missed all of that.

"I don't think so," she said. "Maybe the Saturday game? We'll go with Riku."

Sora made an agreeable noise, and closed his eyes. Kairi rested a hand in his hair, warm from the early-autumn sun, and wondered when his presence would become routine again rather than unusual and precious. She let the silence stretch on comfortably for several long minutes before breaking it.

"Sora?"

"Mmmph. Yeah?"

"Will you teach me to fight?"

His eyes opened, sleepy and surprised. "...What?"

"To fight. Like you and Riku do." He continued to look puzzled. She sighed. "I have a keyblade, too, but I don't have any idea what to _do_ with it."

"Oh." He sat up, suddenly awake and serious. "Sure, of course I will, but…" She could see the frown starting as a crease between his eyebrows. "…Do you think you'll need to?"

"I don't know," she said. "I hope not. But if something happens… Sora, I'm not going to be left behind again."

She could see the protests rising immediately in his eyes. "I would never leave you behind on purpose, Kairi. Neither of us would."

"I know," she said. "But I think I have a keyblade for a reason. And next time I'm coming with you – both of you – and I'm going to personally chew my way through anybody who tries to stop me."

Sora laughed. "Sounds good."

---

Sora held his keyblade like a baseball bat, and when he demonstrated how he struck with it (slowly, so she could see) she couldn't help but wonder how flailing around could be very effective. Until he started to get into it: as he whaled on the innocent rock he'd picked for a practice target, his movements sped up and turned liquid. A few minutes more and he leaped and flipped and spun as if he were in flight, until her eye had trouble tracking his movements.

Even though she could tell he was slowing himself down when they sparred, holding back so she could see what he was doing and try to match it... it was like fighting the wind. A merry, jubilant, triumphant wind.

"You'll get better," he said, once she was breathless and sweating and needed a break. "Leon _flattened_ me the first time I met him, but it was just a little while before I could hold my own against him. More or less. You just have to put yourself into it. Don't hold back. And practice. Everything else follows." And he demonstrated – slash slash strike _leap_, spinning on the air.

Watching him, fierce and crazy and wild and _gorgeous_, made her heart speed up to a blur in her chest.

---

It was frustrating to learn that Riku's approach to the keyblade was completely opposite.

She didn't learn that for some time, though, because at first Riku adamantly refused to teach her. "Keyblades hurt," he said, a little grimly, a little wryly. "Believe me, I know."

She knew that this was his way of saying _I couldn't live with myself if I hurt you_.

Piecing together what the two of them had told her, it wasn't hard to see why Sora was willing and Riku wasn't. While Sora had fought serious, deadly battles, he had also sparred with his friends from Hollow Bastion and entered Coliseum games where no one was meant to die or even be seriously hurt. But from what little Riku would share of his own journey, she had a feeling that he had always fought in dead earnest and with deadly force. Riku had felt the sting of Roxas' keyblades. Riku's body – under the control of Xehanort's heartless – had turned those blades against Sora.

He finally acquiesced. "Well, I can show you some things," he said, bending under the weight of her earnest request. He still refused to spar with her, but she knew better than to press on that issue.

He held his keyblade far differently than Sora – with a one-handed precision grip, not the two-handed power swing Sora used. He seemed to plan his movements more carefully, too. He didn't join battle with a leap and a laugh; he threw himself in as though he was calculating the exact angle of his attack, and his strokes were fierce but exacting, deliberate, inevitable as an avalanche. Balance and guard, strike and parry and counterstrike. Way to the Dawn was elegant in his hands.

He taught her the same way, showing her stances, grips, how to slice up or twist in or block a stab or a slash. His hand on her wrist or her waist, guiding her in the proper motion, drove the breath out of her lungs.

---

She sat on her bed with her keyblade across her lap, looking out the window, wondering how on earth she was going to learn to do anything _useful_.

A faint presence shivered in the back of her mind, like the furry brush of a moth's wings. She refocused her eyes so she was staring at her own reflection in the glass. "Hi, Namine," she said.

_Hello hello_, said the witch, and for a moment she could see another face in the reflection, butter-fair hair and blue eyes lighter than her own.

"I suppose you have a third, entirely contradictory set of advice for how to use this thing," Kairi said, but she was smiling, because it wasn't often that Namine manifested herself so clearly.

_Nope_. Namine giggled, and the sound shivered over Kairi's skin. _My life would have been much more interesting if I'd had a chance to use a keyblade, but alas._

"I can't help but feel like I have it for a reason. But I couldn't really do much of anything with it before, and I'm afraid that something else will happen and I won't be able to help…" She exhaled, flexing her fingers around the keyblade and then letting it go, watching as it dissolved in a breath of sparks. "If I have to be a princess, I'm going to be – I'm not going to be a Rapunzel."

_Good choice. It's no fun whatever to be shut in a tower._

"—but I'm going to need to know how to do things. I'm going to need to know how to fight. I can't fight – if Riku hadn't been there last time, I can't pretend I wouldn't've gotten flattened."

Namine was so quiet then that Kairi wondered if she'd resubmerged herself. Finally, she said, _Sora fights… like Sora. Riku fights like Riku. Who, then, should Kairi fight like?_

Kairi didn't have to answer.

After a moment, she met the eyes that were her-own-and-not-her-own in the windowglass, and said, "Thank you."

_Trust yourself_, Namine said, and now she really was drifting back into the corners of Kairi's mind. _You know I do._

Kairi's eyes stung a little at that, and she placed her hand on the glass until her gaze contained no one but herself.

---

Kairi dreamed…

_...of a shore where she and Sora and Riku stand back-to-back-to-back. The air hums and throbs with a strong smell of ozone. Her skin crawls. Something is coming..._

_...and her keyblade is in her hand, as natural as the draw of breath. When the darkness crests and falls, she is ready. She can see, from the corner of one eye, Sora leaping into the fray with a cry, and from the corner of her other eye she can see the powerful sweep of Riku's keyblade._

_And her own movements are a dance, neither unplanned nor deliberate but rhythmic. It is the draw and release of the waves, the coil of the ocean current. The way she shifts her weight, the swing of her keyblade like the pull of the tide, it is so right that it buoys her up..._

Kairi woke, laughing.


End file.
